Even the secular press has come to realise that the Synod is a process directed against the Church as it has existed for almost two millennia.
By S.A. McCarthy
The Synod on Synodality is following the German Synodal Way down the road toward liberalism.
The fruits of the “synodal spirit” infecting the Catholic Church are revealing themselves: dissent and division. In a letter dated late last month, Berlin’s archbishop Heiner Koch gave priests of his archdiocese permission to bless same-sex unions, in direct defiance of the Vatican’s repeated clarifications. Back in March, the final meeting of the German Synodal Way approved a document calling on the nation’s bishops “to officially allow blessing ceremonies in their dioceses for couples who love each other and want to commit themselves, but to whom sacramental marriage is not accessible or who do not want to enter into it.”
Even earlier, all the way back in 2021, Pope Francis and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) clarified officially and explicitly that no priest, bishop, diocese, or even the Vatican has the authority to bless same-sex unions. The dictum explained, “In some ecclesial contexts, plans and proposals for blessings of unions of persons of the same sex are being advanced. Such projects are not infrequently motivated by a sincere desire to welcome and accompany homosexual persons.” But blessings, the Vatican explained, are sacramentals, which signify the sacraments and are meant to help the faithful prepare, through the prayers of the Church, to receive the powerful graces conferred through sacraments by uniquely sanctifying “various occasions of life.”
Blessings, as a form of sacramental, can only be granted to those things which are, by their nature, disposed to receive the graces for which the sacramental is intended to prepare them: in other words, only things ordered rightly according to God’s design can be blessed, disordered things cannot be. “For this reason,” the CDF declared, “it is not licit to impart a blessing on relationships, or partnerships, even stable, that involve sexual activity outside of marriage … as is the case of the unions between persons of the same sex.” Additionally, since sacramentals are analogous to the sacraments, blessing a same-sex union would be making that union analogous to the sacrament of marriage, which cannot be as the Church defines marriage as being only between a man and a woman.
Unless the Vatican emphasizes the voice of the Church … the Church’s doctrine will be forgotten for generations.
This clarification of the Church’s longstanding moral doctrine was expressly approved by Pope Francis, who gave to it his full authority as Supreme Pontiff. Yet the German Synodal Way still went ahead with calling for same-sex blessings, and Koch still went ahead and gave the green light to his priests. In his letter, Koch cited Pope Francis’s protégé Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernández, the new head of the CDF, who recently teased the possibility of same-sex blessings, provided those blessings were in no way confused with the sacrament of marriage. Of course, Fernández must not have read the doctrinal clarification issued by the office he himself is about to lead, or else he might understand the nature of sacramentals.
As noted, Koch’s letter is a direct result of the German Synodal Way, a years-long series of meetings featuring clerics and laity, ostensibly intended to address the root causes of the clerical sex abuse crisis and its coverup. What that synod yielded instead were mandates for the blessing of homosexuality, the ordination of women to the priesthood, the abolition of priestly celibacy, and the creation of a lay council to replace bishops in ecclesial matters. As a matter of fact, the Vatican sharply criticized many of the Germans’ proposals. Cardinal Marc Ouellet, then-head of the Vatican’s curial Congregation for Bishops, argued that “the extremely serious matter of the abuse cases has been exploited to push through other ideas not directly related to it,” adding that the majority of the Synodal Way’s proposals “openly contradict the teaching affirmed by all the popes since the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council.” Cardinal Luis Ladaria, then-prefect of the CDF, warned that the Germans were “reducing the mystery of the Church to a mere institution of power.”
Pope Francis stressed the distinction between the German Synodal Way and the global Synod on Synodality, which meets next month. Despite his differentiations, though, there are striking similarities between the dissident Synodal Way and the as-yet-unfinished Synod on Synodality. Many of the same heterodox principles advanced by the Germans are being advanced on the global scale, too. For example, the organizer of the global Synod, Luxembourg’s cardinal Jean Claude Hollerich, has explicitly endorsed female ordinations and has declared that the Church must change its moral doctrine on homosexuality. This view has only been reinforced in synodal “listening sessions” across the globe, where “marginalized” voices (LGBT and ex-Catholics) are amplified and faithful Catholics (or, God forbid, traditionalists!) are silenced.
During the continental phase of the Synod earlier this year, the German delegates advocated the same wayward ideologies they had successfully pushed in their own country, but they were not alone. The delegates from Switzerland, Ireland, and the UK joined in the class for condoning homosexuality and ordaining women “priestesses,” with some of the French joining them. October’s global phase meeting seems hardly likely to result in a drastically different ideology, especially when the Pope’s hand-picked representatives include pro-gay Jesuit James Martin and left-wing cardinals Blase Cupich of Chicago, Wilton Gregory of Washington, and Robert McElroy of San Diego.
Unless the Vatican emphasizes the voice of the Church and her thousands of years of well-developed doctrine and dogma over the voices of dissident, embittered, and effeminate clerics hungry for power and sick of celibacy, then the Berlin archdiocese’s new diktat won’t be an anomaly but the global norm, and the Church’s doctrine will be forgotten for generations.
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